Introduction

Heritage is all around us. We see it in cities and landscapes, we find it in churches, synagogues and mosques. We are familiar with thinking of heritage in the form of objects held in museums or historical lessons taught in school curricula. Yet, heritage is also something personal that we carry with us: in memories, in practices, in sayings and in our habits.

We may not think about it as educators, but children and other learners bring heritage with them to school, just as museum visitors bring it with them when they walk around an exhibit. If educators can bring personal and public heritage into dialogue in classrooms or museums, heritage can become an exciting and empowering tool for cultural learning and inclusiveness.

It is with this aim in mind that we have prepared this Activity Book for educators working in a range of institutions. It contains a host of ice breakers, classroom exercises and activities that can be undertaken in city streets or museums, and it has interactive resources that you can use to become a heritage mediator.

From Expert to Mediator

This Activity Book is to be read alongside the Handbook which is also available free and online. We wrote these books as the final output of a two-year project to create new forms of teaching with heritage. We were convinced that if heritage is to prove a subject that helps improve social inclusion in Europe, then it requires new techniques that help teachers become mediators between the heritage of participants (and their communities) and the heritage out there in the public space.

The challenge we set ourselves was to pioneer ways to help learners take a more active part in the creation of new forms of heritage, particularly the heritage with which they identify. The Handbook provides the theoretical background to the approaches that undergird both learning and teaching. The chapters investigate how objects, places and practices originating in the past are given a narrative as they are transformed into heritage and this provides the grounding for personal and community identities. These narratives are continually being made and remade. Heritage is no longer thought of as something static or authoritatively identified by experts and communicated to a passive public. Rather, it is seen as the product and process of meaning-making between teachers and students, scholars and community activists. Its place is not just cathedrals and museums. It can be practised in various locations, wherever individuals and communities want to combine and compare historical perspectives in a process of reflection and thereby create a pluralist vision of heritage, reflecting a diverse Europe, for now and for the future.

The Activity Book provides practical assistance to you, the reader, whether you are a teacher, an artist, a community activist or a museum curator. We hope that it helps you to play a mediating role in a multifaceted process involving many voices. Together, we can contribute to the ongoing development of heritage in which we can all participate. In this way, new heritage narratives will be created.

Challenges

Recent developments in European heritage policy have strongly emphasized the role heritage can play in cultural democracy and social inclusion. It is a fact of the contemporary learning environment, however, that the plurality and interculturality that underlies much of European heritage is also being challenged. At the time of writing, polarizing, defensive and even exclusionary narratives are being encountered more and more frequently across many levels of European society. This is affecting how heritage is engaged with.

The adult learning classroom has not escaped this trend, which negatively affects religious and ethnic minority learners. In a recent survey conducted among the participants of adult training groups in Spain and in Hungary, it was found that one fifth and more than half of participants, respectively, would feel uncomfortable with the participation of either a Muslim or a Roma peer (Special Eurobarometer 493, 2018). How are we to use heritage for social inclusion when our classroom dynamics themselves are polarized?

In such a context, educators need better tools so they can openly address situations of discrimination and engage in intercultural conflict resolution. We believe that it is better to be frank about tensions than to assume that inclusion is always supported. We need to acknowledge that difficult problems arise in the classroom. In this way, cultural heritage can serve as an essential tool for both trainers and learners in uncovering Europe’s plural past and fostering inclusive and safe learning spaces. In this way, the classroom supports cultural democracy for all.

Goals

We have developed this Activity Book in order to:

• Foster inclusion, diversity and non-discrimination in the classroom, particularly with regard to religious minorities.
• Promote the social and educational value of European cultural heritage in learning, and its potential to generate interreligious co-existence.
• Extend and develop the competences of educators to foster inclusion through their teaching practice, particularly in multicultural learner contexts.

This Activity Book will help you to break the ice on complex and often sensitive topics of heritage and identity, to build a comfortable and safe environment for group work and peer-to-peer interaction, and to use heritage to empower learners from an intercultural perspective – especially learners from minority groups.

Contents

The Activity Book begins with a short essay on heritage that can be handed out in classrooms. It is a simple version of the more substantive scholarly article found in the Handbook.

The main section of this book contains user-friendly and adaptable activities of various lengths and types, along with resources and teaching tips. There are 29 teaching activities related to heritage that are summarized in a Table of Activities, where you can find basic information including the amount of time to allow for each activity.

The activities weave together critical approaches to heritage using methods that we have found useful in building skills to address conflicts, discriminatory behaviours and cultural shocks within the adult classroom.

Each activity is described in such a way that it can be replicated in a wide range of learning contexts. Activities can be used individually, or can be combined into more complex learning paths, as required by the group and depending on the time available.

We encourage you to use these activities as needed, adapting the content in accordance with the interests of learners, their language levels, the diversity in the group and the number of participants, among other factors.

The Activity Book concludes with a table of twenty-four heritage elements that are connected to an
interactive map This is a resource and a possible model for how to rediscover and reinterpret heritage/cultural elements around us. We selected and researched these elements from the different countries of the participants in the REBELAH project: Spain, the Netherlands, France and Hungary. These elements were suggested by participants during our pilot activities.

We invite the reader to explore this selection of elements carefully and imaginatively. The multiple narratives and perspectives concerning these objects, sites and people, and the fact that they were given to us by the participants, showcase the plural and migrant origins of Europe. We hope that this will provide inspiration for you as you work with your own participants to create new inclusive heritage maps.